Optimize Humanity, Not Productivity - Anda Gansca

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist, I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Anda Ganska, co-founder and CEO of Notch, a Romanian-born entrepreneur who's built a fast-growing capital business, helping Fortune 1000 companies understand and improve the performance of their digital investments.

0:42She was raised in Transylvania, comes out of a math and computer science background, then heads to Stanford, where she graduates in the top 1 % of her class with a double major in economics and international relations. Now, before Notch, she spent time in venture capital, launched multiple nonprofit initiatives, and started building the foundation for what would become her focus, blending data, storytelling, and impact. Since founding Notch, she's raised over$40 million, helped other entrepreneurs do the same, and continues to play an active role mentoring and advising early-stage founders. Finally, she's someone who understands both the numbers and the narrative.

1:21Not an easy thing to do and how to make them work together. Anda Ganska, welcome to the CMO Whisperer Show.

1:28Anda Gansca:Thank you, Steve. What an introduction. Who wrote that? How did you know I was top one person in my class? I feel like I don't share that often. I can't confirm where I got that from. So it's just funny. You must have called the university. Oh, my gosh. It is such a good thing. It's wonderful to be here. And it was so much fun to prep with you. I think the fact that we're just going to have a fun and formal conversation is just a treat. It's going to be the highlight of my day. Wow. Okay. We'll see. Tell me if you feel the same way at the end. How's that? Well, it's a Monday, so the bar's low.

2:00That's true. Good point. Okay. I want to start with marketing counterculture. So I think you said, or I've read somewhere, 75 % of marketers, if 75 % of marketers are doing one thing, I should say, Why should we be paying attention to the other 25 %?

2:17Anda Gansca:I think in the age of AI, what 75 % of people are doing is achieving some type of mediocre output via AI. And the reason we should pay attention to what everyone else is doing is because they're either trying to do better with AI and accept the AI as table stakes and figure out how they can improve it and essentially make it more human so that they gain the benefits and the efficiencies of AI. but the humanity of real creative, or they're just trying to do it in a completely different way. And I think there's actually going to be a rise in brands that are sort of trademarked themselves as fundamentally human brands.

2:55Anda Gansca:And I think buyers are going to potentially care enough to want to go for that. Maybe that's going to be the new version of extreme luxury. I don't know. But I find that what the median is doing is really just going to be median or average. So I always like to look at the counterculture. I also think there's something happening right now in the world that as a fan of history, I feel like I've seen it in all my readings of moments like this in history before, where we're kind of looking at the world and saying, no, this time will be different. and so we're all freaking out about how AI is going to be this or that.

3:29Anda Gansca:And the reality is it's never different. It's almost always the same pattern. And so I'm interested in people who have that critical thinking, who can look at this and say, actually, this is just another wave of technology. It does not replace the human. Here's what it does. Here's what it doesn't do. And they don't just fall into the kind of trap of clickbait, if you will, which there's a lot of nowadays. No, I love that. And you don't know this yet because it didn't come up in our off-the-air conversation. But one of the things I loved to do when I was at Forbes, when I was writing a lot, was just go into a piece of research.

4:04And I was always interested in what the opposite of. 63 % of people are doing it. I want to know why the other 37 % are doing it. So I love that, that you had that thinking of.

4:15Anda Gansca:Totally. Right? It's the same principle. Totally. I think nowadays that's where the gold is. Just assume that if you're doing something with AI, everyone else is doing it. Is there a danger, though, of not paying enough attention to the 75 %? I don't think so. Okay. I don't know about you, but I have not met a marketer in the last year, maybe two years, that isn't obsessing about AI or isn't being told that they have to make massive change with AI. I think at the beginning, maybe there was a three-month phase where marketers were, Some marketers were more reticent about AI, but no, not anymore.

4:50Anda Gansca:I think we've now, you know, I think humanity has this ability to kind of go all the way to the one end and all the way to the other. And again, the clickbait and sort of personalized algorithms of social media don't help. And so I think now we're all the way to the other side where we think AI is the end all be all and we're going to be replaced by higher intelligence and so on. So usually the truth and reality ends up being somewhere in the middle. Great point. what do you think steve what do you think is counterculture in today's world and and is it important to listen to counterculture it sounds like you're aligned i thank you for i love that you're flipping the script here you're going to take over co-hosting that's fine yeah why not well like i like i alluded to earlier i i want to always be the the anti go against the grain right i do that in life not to get all soapboxy on you here but i always want to know why the other what's the other part doing and why are they doing it?

5:45Why aren't they following the trend, right? And I think in the context of what you and I are talking about with AI, I almost used the word lazy, right? And that may come across as a negative connotation, so be it. But to just be able to drop something in Claude or chat or whatever, you were getting really close if we have not crossed that lazy line, if that makes sense.

6:07Anda Gansca:Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. where again, I'm not anti-AI, believe me, I'm not. But to just wake up and just drop everything in the chat and okay, whatever you tell me to do, I'm gonna do, no. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I wonder how we should think about this word lazy and some of the benefits of being lazy. Like I've asked myself, what are the types of people that are going to do really well in this world of AI? And I do think lazy is one of the attributes of the people that will do the best. I think brilliant people who have original thought but are too lazy to try to write 50 pages of something or to go through multiple variants of ideas.

6:50Anda Gansca:I think those people, I mean, I think I qualify for that. I think those people are going to do well because it's really about the fast iteration of multiple variants of your idea that maybe you were too lazy to try before. but now that you have plot or GPT, you're able to do. The other thing that I've been thinking about, and I was talking to a few different marketing teams and customers about this. I think you had Andrea Brimmer from Ally on the podcast, right? I was talking to Andrea and her team about this as well. And just kind of saying to them that we have customers that went almost like too early into some of these technologies.

7:28Anda Gansca:And as a result, they've had to change their processes so many times. And in fact, I almost feel like they were and are at a disadvantage because they're in the experimental group and in some ways are lazier customers who've stood back and watched it all unfold a little bit more and acted. Maybe they're acting now with more data. In some ways, they're doing better. So I'll just I'll say, look, lazy is an interesting word. I think in the context of AI could have positive connotations in different ways, both as a consumer and as a team. I agree with you. The word lazy has many connotations. I didn't necessarily to imply it would only be negative, but usually that word, it doesn't have a lot of positive anyway, right?

8:12But there's something to be said for being lazy in the right context, if that makes sense.

8:16Anda Gansca:I mean, look, if you think about what AI will likely do to all of us overall, I think it's going to create new jobs and so on. But ultimately, it's going to replace our primary KPI and purpose as human beings from productivity to something else. Because we spend all of this time, like decades and decades, especially since the Industrial Revolution, thinking that our purpose as humans on this earth is to be productive. So the word lazy has a negative connotation because we are used to being productive. And if we can have a checklist and, you know, go through that checklist and ace our checklist at the end of the day, then we feel good.

8:52Anda Gansca:And then we feel like our purpose has been accomplished. That's moving away from all of our existence in mind. Our KPIs about business outcomes and how we get there, you know, whether we do it with AI or not. I think, again, if you're lazy and use AI in the right ways, I almost think you're going to be at a better advantage. So then you start to change. Okay, my purpose as a professional, as a person isn't to be productive. It's to get to the outcome the fastest way with the least friction, you know, capabilities that will get me there. Okay, so I agree with what you're saying. How do you know, and I'm really asking euphemistically, when to trust the data versus challenge it?

9:32Anda Gansca:What do you mean by the data? Well, the output, right? Whether it's an AI or literally the data. Yeah. I think that's where human intuition comes into play. I think intuition and judgment, those are going to be the greatest currencies. I think intuition and judgment are often created by experience, by adding a lot to how you understand history, how you understand patterns, how you understand the human that's on the... If you're a marketer, you have to understand the human that's on the other end that you're trying to sell to. The more you can deepen that intuition, that understanding, that expertise, I think the better your ability to look at the output and say, yes, this is good or no, it's not, that that's going to be the difference maker.

10:14Anda Gansca:If you're just a dumb layer on top of an AI output, then what's your role? You know, the AI can just do it. So I think in some ways, AI is just going to make us more human. It's going to force us to go into the things that are fundamentally human. And those are going to be the biggest differentiators. And I'm talking like overall for all of us and humanity in general, but also about marketing in particular. You realize how oxymoronish that sounds, right? And I'm not saying it's an advantage, but AI is going to make us more human, right? Yes, I believe that. And I completely agree too. But you can see how some people would go, what?

10:50That doesn't make any sense, but it does.

10:52Anda Gansca:It's taking away from the things that we were doing to replicate, to some extent, machines, you know? I think there's this famous video with Jensen from NVIDIA. Someone asked him, what's the smartest person you've met? And he says, we all used to think that smartest person meant the smartest engineer, the person who could write the most best. And those are the first things that are 100 % being disrupted by AI. So what's going to be the value add of an engineer on top of code? It is going to be fundamentally their creative intuition, their expertise, their ability to do something well beyond what an AI could.

11:29Anda Gansca:The same is true for almost every role. So I think it is forcing us to tap further into what makes us fundamentally human that's going to help us differentiate ourselves from what the 75 % is doing, because that's not going to win. AI outputs on their own are not going to win. It's the thing we do to them that will make us win. So let me take a step down the path here, the rabbit hole, get a little granular. What is AI actually changing in marketing right now? Well, I think it's doing all the busy work that we have so many teams and workflows all established to do. I think we are an interesting case study at Notch because we work with Fortune 1000 marketing teams, but we also don't really have a marketing team of our own.

12:11Anda Gansca:And one of the reasons is because we started to employ not just our data and our internal expertise, but to really automate a lot of the things that we thought we needed to go higher for. And it's been fascinating. You know, in our case, we work with Cloud Cowork quite a lot. We work with Gemini as well, really for different things. I think the more you use these models, the more you realize that they're good at some things and maybe not at others. But the more we've used them, the more we've realized the things that really matter and are differentiated that we're probably going to end up hiring for are creative and brand.

12:46Anda Gansca:like really the big creative ideas that it's not, it's just like orthogonal thinking. It's, it's, you can't, you can't go from, I'm going to give this AI set of inputs and this AI is going to give me the big idea for the next campaign or the next positioning for this product. So that's something that I really believe we need, but ideally it's a person who knows exactly how to employ AI in order to automate product marketing from it. Like ideally you have someone who does that. You have the product leader, who's giving you the product positioning. You have a commercial leader who says this is who we need to go after and with those inputs you can sort of generate sales enablement copy product marketing even positioning for different campaigns you can generate you know synthetic testing for variants of the different campaigns i mean so much is automated or will become more and more automated but i do think that creative thought and to some extent, multi-variable reasoning, like being able to optimize for brand, for strategic goals, for your ICP, all of that all at once, I still think it's a team sport amongst human beings.

13:52What's being overhyped about AI right now?

13:54Anda Gansca:I think weirdly, even though AI can generate product marketing, sales enablement, the bar that I think we have for that kind of content is not that high. I think what we're overhyping is AI's ability to generate really great customer facing content. Internal facing content, that's one thing. The bar is very different. External customer facing content, I still think we're overhyping AI's ability to generate great content. And trust me when I tell you all we do day in, day out is measure content. We really know what great content looks like. We know how AI created content performs as opposed to human created content.

14:31Anda Gansca:The human very much needs to be in the loop when creating great content that's customer facing. So that's number one. I think AEO and GEO is overhyped, but not because LLM visibility is not important. It's because everyone and their grandmother is selling marketers on the idea that they can control LLM visibility when in fact they cannot. But on top of that, even if you assume you can actually improve your LLM visibility position, I still think across our customers, none of our customers have actually seen a true fundamental change to their business outcomes. So what I think is really happening is that consumers may not be going to Google as much to do parts of their research.

15:09Anda Gansca:Consumers may not be going to websites earlier in their research process. Consumers are using LLMs for research. That is changing their mindset. It's changing their expectation of what they then expect from a brand. But I don't think that many more people are actually converting. I think the number of people who are converting and becoming customers is staying flat, even though the traffic changes and customer journey changes are different. So I don't know about that area. I think it's overhyped. I think there's a lot of noise. And all of our customers who are doing experiments on that front are not quite seeing the conversion payback.

15:43Anda Gansca:All of them are talking about we're seeing an increase in our AI visibility rank, which are these sort of made up metrics that we have no idea whether they correlate to downstream conversions. But so far, we haven't seen a true correlation. So you mentioned content, right? I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a second. In the context of branding, messaging, marketing, is there a fear of we're headed toward a world where everything starts to sound the same? For sure. I think it, yes, that's exactly what I think we need to avoid. Or as a marketer, I would try to avoid. I think that's why when I say internal facing copy, like product marketing and sales enablement, totally fine to use AI to re-automate that because you have, you know, humans that have that internal facing copy and can use critical thinking to know how to present it to the world.

16:30Anda Gansca:But if you're thinking about content that you're actually putting out in the world in front of your customers, I think you have to take a step back and wonder if AI is generating this for me and it's generating it for my competitor, what's going to be my point of differentiation? Yeah. I mean, and the follow-up is like, if everybody has the same tools, theoretically, where does that differentiation come from? Exactly. And I have an answer too. Please. I think the answer is personalization. I mentioned to you, Steve, that we're launching something soon. I've been diving deep into the world of personalization, trying to figure out why it's been this broken promise for marketers for the past 10 years.

17:05Anda Gansca:Like, was it a technology issue? Was it a content issue? Was it a setup issue? And there's a lot of, it's an interesting conversation to have, but I think the way that you can actually both use AI to automate a lot of outputs, but also have the right creative human thought put into it and then arrive at a output that's actually relevant for the consumer in a one-on-one basis is ultimately personalization. Why we're not there yet, that's been the subject of my exploration for the past year and a half. We'll be on the lookout for that announcement. Okay, this topic, I'm really interested. Not that I wasn't interested in all these topics, but the CMO versus CFO tension, right?

17:47Topic. Really interested to get your thoughts on this. And have we trained, and we being marketers, CFOs to be skeptical or has marketing just not done a good enough job telling its story?

17:58Anda Gansca:I think marketing in general doesn't do a good enough job telling its story. Marketing is usually on the defense when marketing should be on the offense because it is the first place that everyone turns to when whenever costs have to be cut. It is the first place where everyone turns to whenever there's a new technology to be adopted. So I think there's a double whammy happening right now to CMOs where the CFO hears, oh, you can use AI to automate all these things, which is partially true, true in some ways, not true in others, but they're coming to CMOs and saying, what are you doing? Show me the money, show me the automation.

18:35Anda Gansca:And then on top of that, But because there's a lot of pressure in the public markets and costs have to go down, the double whammy of, so how are we decreasing costs overall from a marketing perspective? I would say across our customers, probably 10 to 15 % of our CMOs do it right, which is before the CFO could even think to ask. They go to the CFO and say, look, I've done an analysis. I figured out the places where we can automate. I figured out where we cannot. here's a pot of money that I'm going to put up as a variable pot of money. I can give it back to you if you want right now, or I can hold it and use it in an outcome-driven way for these four initiatives.

19:17Anda Gansca:Meanwhile, here's what I'm going to do. Here's how I'm going to automate some of the functions. Here's how I'm thinking about repurposing the humans that we have so that we're using them in the right ways. And as a result, really dictating the messaging. What I usually see happen is it goes the other way around. The CFO makes the call, the CMO then has to scramble to presentation about the ROI of this and that. And ultimately the result isn't great. Sometimes it's not great for the marketing team. Sometimes it's not great for the CMO. So the CMO is being reactive, right? Instead of proactive. Yes.

19:49Anda Gansca:I think, I think for the most part, but some of the best CMOs are definitely extremely proactive. It's not just about making friends with the CFO. It's about going to the CFO and telling them, here's my cost savings that I'm ready to give to you. But if you let me keep it, here's how I'm actually going to drive you more business. Right. It's no more complicated than if I'm a CMO, this is how I can make your life easier, Mr. CFO. Yeah, essentially. Exactly. Yeah. You kind of do the work for them and present it to them. And they're happy that they don't have to come to you with their own analysis.

20:21Anda Gansca:And hopefully they're also happy because you're proposing that you're driving more business. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I greatly simplified that, but you got my point. I think as a CMO, if you have an ego about increasing your budget every year in today's world, it's going to be tough. I think at best, you can hope that you will keep the number of your full-time employees flat. That's at best. And that's assuming you can repurpose them in ways that are AI complementary. And budget-wise, think flat, up, down. It really depends on how well you can tell the story of acquisition. And I think if you overly index on things like AI visibility, that hasn't actually been improvement to drive conversions, it may hurt.

21:02Anda Gansca:I think if you over-index on paid, it may well hurt. So it's not easy, but I think there is a path of thinking holistically about the customer journey and how it's unfolding that could lead you to the right mix of investments. So you mentioned ego. It seems to be coming more of a liability, right? In marketing right now. Why is that? I mean, has ego ever been an asset? If so, when? It's a good question. I think I can make the case yes. Do it. Within the context of helping the greater cause, which would be the brand. So if I'm a CMO of a brand and I have an ego that I want to be on stage more, just hypothetically.

21:45But by getting me out there more, it also gets the brand name out there more. Does it not?